CN Bio & iiCON Announce COVID-19 Research Collaboration

CN Bio recently announced a research collaboration with the Infection Innovation Consortium (iiCON), a global collaborative infectious disease R&D program, to validate the next-generation of COVID-19 research tools.

iiCON’s £174 million program brings together industry, academia, and clinicians to accelerate the discovery, development and deployment of new treatments and products – saving and improving millions of lives through collaborative innovation. Led by the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), its partner members are Unilever, Evotec, Liverpool University Hospitals Foundation Trust, University of Liverpool, and Infex Therapeutics.

Under the terms of the agreement, iiCON lead partner, LSTM, a world-leading institute for infectious disease research, will independently validate CN Bio’s novel lung and lung-liver models, designed to advance novel SARS-CoV-2 drug discovery and development.

CN Bio’s SARS-CoV-2 3D lung cell culture models were developed as part of an Innovate UK project to improve the efficiency and accuracy of COVID-19 drug development. The company was granted funding to build multi-cellular upper and lower human airway and multi-organ models that more accurately reflect the human environment and deliver more translatable data, in comparison to current in vivo studies.

By combining in vitro lung and liver cultures, the multi-organ model uniquely enables inter-organ crosstalk effects to be studied; providing deeper human-specific mechanistic insights of the COVID-19 disease state, which is known to affect numerous tissue/organs of the body.The single and multi-organ models have been developed for use with the Company’s PhysioMimix plug-and-play, lab-benchtop MPS, enabling straightforward incorporation into current pre-clinical research projects investigating the next generation of COVID-19 therapeutics to treat and prevent the infection.

Expanding on the project with Innovate UK, within nine months, CN Bio’s perfused lung models are to be transferred to LSTM for validation, to demonstrate the ability of the PhysioMimix systems to support the full viral life cycle of SARS-CoV-2 and facilitate testing with anti-viral compounds. LSTM will validate the systems’ use in high containment laboratories (CL3) for studies with infectious viral materials and validate the system’s potential to identify PK/PD indices and PD Targets for the development of safe and efficacious dosing regimens of new antiviral therapeutics.

Following this initial evaluation, it is intended that iiCON will have access to the PhysioMimix technology and its associated 3D tissue models for a variety of translational infectious disease projects. A successful outcome from the collaboration will support researchers globally by providing advanced insights to SARS-CoV-2 infections in humans and enable CN Bio to expand its portfolio of OOC models to address a broader and more diverse range of therapeutic areas.

Dr Tomasz Kostrzewski, Director of Biology, CN Bio, said “iiCON’s commitment to collaborative innovation has enabled our pioneering partnership with consortium lead, LSTM. This collaboration will provide access to the institute’s world-leading expertise in infectious disease research, in addition to the consortium’s outstanding industry links. As a result of this collaboration, it is our joint intention that the data generated will be published, providing us with proof that supports the adoption of PhysioMimix microphysiological systems into industry, where they can be used as translational tools to accelerate understanding of SARS-CoV-2 infection and consequently, accelerate the development of new therapeutic options.”

Professor Giancarlo Biagini, iiCON Platform Lead, Head of the Department of Tropical Disease Biology at LSTM, and UKRI Innovation Scholar, added “Facilitating the industry academic interface to drive forward transformative technologies and fast-track innovative health solutions to our most pressing global infectious disease challenges is at the heart of iiCON’s purpose. “As part of the consortium, LSTM is delighted to be entering into this key agreement with CN Bio. By leveraging emerging organ-on-a-chip technology, we aim to develop pre-clinical platforms that accelerate translational research of new therapeutics to manage and treat major human infections, including emerging and high consequence infectious diseases such SARS-COV-2.”

CN Bio is a leading organ-on-a-chip (OOC) company that offers a range of products and services to improve the accuracy and efficiency of drug discovery. With more than a decade of research and development experience in multi-organ microphysiology, the Company aims to transform the way human-relevant pre-clinical data is generated through the development of the most complete model of the human “Body-on-a-Chip” in the laboratory.

CN Bio’s product portfolio comprises a range of microphysiological systems (MPS), including the PhysioMimix™ Single- and Multi-Organ OOC MPS and the proprietary PhysioMimix Pharmacokinetics (PK) system, to enable researchers to model human biology in the lab through rapid and predictive 3D human tissue-based studies that harness microfluidic technology. The technology bridges the gap between traditional cell culture and human studies, advancing towards the simulation of human biological conditions to support the accelerated development of new therapeutics in application areas including oncology, infectious diseases, metabolism and inflammation.

Through its portfolio of products and services, CN Bio supports researchers that require data-rich in vitro studies for the analysis of novel compounds, and assessment of toxicity and safety, in addition to supporting investigation into a broad range of biological processes across different organ cell-types, in application areas including ADME and toxicology, disease modelling, drug discovery, drug metabolism and pharmacokinetics, and drug repurposing.

CN Bio’s technology is developed internally and licensed from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northeastern University and Vanderbilt University, and has been successfully adopted by numerous pharma and academic partners, including recognition from the US FDA. CN Bio’s headquarters and laboratories are based in Cambridge, UK, with an international network of distributors.